Meta is shutting down a video speed-dating service it had tested over a good part of last year, the company informed the service’s users via a recent email. Last April, the company formerly known as Facebook confirmed it was testing a new dating service called Sparked, which was developed by its in-house incubator, the NPE
Payments company Checkout.com isn’t just a unicorn — it has closed a $1 billion Series D founding round. Following today’s round, the company is now valued at $40 billion. That’s a stark increase compared to last year’s valuation. With its Series C round, the company raised $450 million at a $15 billion valuation — it represents
Singapore-based industrial robotics firm Sesto this week announced a $5.7 million raise, featuring TRIVE, WTI GmbH and SEEDS Capital (Enterprise Singapore’s VC wing). The round follows a similarly sized $4 million Series A, back in 2018. Sesto has had a busy few years since that round — as have many in the industrial robotics category,
UBITS, a B2B online learning platform for upskilling employees in Latin America, has raised $25 million in funding led by Riverwood Capital. Julián Melo and Marta Forero founded UBITS in Bogota, Colombia, in 2018 after the pair came up with the idea of “creating the Netflix for corporate training for LatAm.” They applied to Y
The creator of one of the earliest and most enduringly iconic virtual worlds is returning to his roots. Second Life’s founder Philip Rosedale will rejoin the company he founded in 1999 as a strategic advisor after High Fidelity, the spatial audio company Rosedale co-founded in 2013, invested in Second Life’s developer Linden Lab. The deal
Embedded finance continues to be the engine driving the growth of fintech, with one group of companies building core banking, payments and other financial technology, and a much bigger group tapping that technology through APIs to build customer-facing businesses. Today, one of the bigger players on the core technology side — Global Processing Services —
Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner Partner Andrey Spektor speaks with Ed Ludlow about the closing arguments during the Elizabeth Holmes trial and upcoming jury deliberations.
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for January 14, 2022! I suppose that this has been the week of Wordle, in that everyone and their dog are tweeting their scores and results.
Checkout technology company Bolt continues to make quick work of attracting new capital. The company announced Friday $355 million in Series E financing to give Bolt an $11 billion valuation, according to sources close to the company. Bolt’s one-click checkout product aims to give businesses the same technology Amazon has been known for since 1997,
Following news that the FTC’s antitrust suit against Meta cleared a critical hurdle earlier this week, the agency is apparently also taking a sharp interest in the company’s VR business. Bloomberg reports that the FTC and multiple state attorneys general are probing Meta’s virtual reality division for “potential anti-competitive practices.” New York reportedly leads the
Daasity, an e-commerce analytics and data company, secured $15 million in Series A funding as it continues developing its approach to helping consumer brands better leverage their customer data to make smarter decisions. VMG Catalyst led the oversubscribed round and was joined by existing investors Cove Fund, Exeter Capital, 1855 Capital, Mooring Ventures, Okapi Venture
EV charging continues to be a high-growth business, for obvious reasons. Since 2007, one of the largest players has been ChargePoint, the floated US company which with a widespread EV charging network. But plenty of startups are snapping at its heels. One of them is Germany-based HeyCharge, which realised there was a problem with how
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday episode, a run-down of key news headlines, startup funding rounds, and whatever else is popping in the worlds of startups and tech. Happily this week, we did not
Like you, I check NFT marketplace volume a few times each day to keep tabs on the burgeoning market for buying and selling digital signatures on various blockchains that point to images and the like. We’re very cool. Mostly, the data is steady. OpenSea volumes tend to lead the space, with other, smaller NFT exchanges
Steve Alexander Contributor Steve Alexander is SVP and CTO of Ciena, a networking systems and software company that works with operators and content providers across the globe. Meta’s stated mission is to seamlessly connect disparate environments like work, social media and gaming so it can allow people to effectively live and work in the virtual
Similar to other industries embracing contract work, Lawtrades is giving legal professionals a way to become independent and run their own virtual law practices. Raad Ahmed and Ashish Walia started the company in 2016 with an initial focus on startups and small businesses, trying to find product-market fit (as one does), but finding that legal
Over 30 civil society organizations, pro-privacy tech businesses and European startups are making a last ditch pitch to try to convince EU lawmakers to put stricter limits on surveillance advertising as a major vote looms on an update to the bloc’s digital rules. The European Parliament will vote shortly to confirm its negotiating position on
A congruence of factors in India — notably, climate change policies, fuel costs and skyrocketing demand for e-commerce — has set up ideal conditions for startups like all-electric commercial vehicle startup EVage. The startup, which has already supplied five EV trucks to Amazon India’s Delivery Service Partner and plans to provide “in the thousands” more
That the venture capital market is incredibly exuberant at the moment is not news. Data from 2021 paints the picture of a startup fundraising game at peak velocity, with more capital, unicorns and nine-figure deals than ever. And let me tell you, some venture capitalists are tired of it. PitchBook has a post up detailing
A competition legal expert, backed by a powerful litigation fund, is set to mount a multibillion-dollar class action suit against Facebook/Meta for breach of competition law on the basis that it abused its dominance of social networking in the U.K. for several years. If successful, the action would see Facebook having to pay $3.1 billion
Many of us are moving around these days a lot less than we used to — because of Covid, we’re working from home instead of an office; and we are traveling and going out less. Now, as we shift back into more “normal” behavior, a startup that’s helping to better understand where and how we
As we’ve learned in the last few years, ‘human error’-led cyber security breaches are the ones companies often find it hardest to guard against. Surveys suggest some 85% of attacks can be traced back to the human factor. Thus startups built to alleviate this gap — such as the UK’s Cybsafe which raises $7-9m last
Shopify President Harley Finkelstein speaks with Emily Chang about post-pandemic trends in e-commerce, how the company can be a way for merchants to work around the supply chain crunch, and what the future of shopping online – and in the metaverse – might look like. ——– Like this video? Subscribe to Bloomberg Technology on YouTube:
In a tight labor market, so-called vertical labor marketplaces that zoom in on one industry, like nursing or hospitality, are drawing funding. Trusted Health, a healthcare staffing platform, raised $149 million in funding in November, for example. Seasoned, a hiring platform for restaurant workers, closed on nearly $19 million at roughly the same time. Investors
Quick blog here to update you on some pretty important movements in the market. Today, in a nasty day for stocks generally, shares of software and cloud companies took a pounding. In numerical terms, the Nasdaq Composite lost 2.51%, per CNBC data. That’s a very bad day for a huge, critical category of publicly traded
The House committee leading the investigation into the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol issued subpoenas to four major tech companies Thursday. Jan. 6 select committee chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) sent letters to YouTube parent company Alphabet, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, Reddit and Twitter demanding for those companies to provide additional
Starting an e-commerce business on one of the large marketplaces, for example, Shopify, can be an easy process, but what the team at Swell began to notice was that the model could only take a business so far. Swell is working in “headless” commerce, which means it is disconnecting the front end of a website,
Meet Stoïk, a new French startup that wants to protect small and medium companies against cybersecurity incidents. The company offers an insurance product as well as a service that monitors your attack surface. The startup recently raised a $4.3 million (€3.8 million) seed round from Alven Capital, Anthemis Group, Kima Ventures as well as several
Leica’s a strange one. It only puts out a handful of cameras every year, and most of them are remixes or minor iterations on previous models. Since 2017 its flagship has been the solid but still somewhat archaic M10, but now the company has revealed its successor: the even more solid and also still somewhat
As competition amid digital banks heats up, U.S. fintech Current is rolling out a new product designed to make its banking service more appealing. The company announced this morning it’s launching a new high-yield offering called “Interest” that allows any Current account holder to earn a 4.00% Annual Percentage Yield (APY) — a rate that’s